Читать книгу The Sweethearts: Tales of love, laughter and hardship from the Yorkshire Rowntree's girls - Lynn Russell - Страница 9

Madge was almost too excited to sleep the night before her first full day at the Rowntree’s factory, and although she knew that she had dropped off for a while during the fleeting hours of summer darkness, she was wide awake as the morning sunshine grew brighter on the edge of the curtains, listening to her two sisters breathing steadily on either side of her. Being the youngest and smallest girl, Madge had to sleep in the middle of the bed between her sisters and there were many times that she cursed her misfortune at having to do so, but not that morning. She felt cosy and safe and warm, lying next to her sisters as she thought ahead to what the day might hold. She smiled to herself when she heard the knocker-up rattling their bedroom window with her long pole, as she pictured the familiar figure of Mrs Ettenfield standing in the street below. Ample-bosomed and no more than four feet ten inches tall, she was almost as tall as she was wide, and Madge’s dad always joked, ‘She needs a pole to reach the parlour window, never mind the bedrooms upstairs.’

Mrs Ettenfield was the last of a dying breed, one of only a handful of knocker-ups left in the whole of the North of England by the early 1930s, and very few of them were women. Before that time, not many families in the street owned an alarm clock, because even the cheapest ones were quite expensive and unreliable, and with stiff financial penalties for being late for work, a lot of families relied instead on the traditional knocker-up to rouse them. Knocker-ups were often the older residents of a neighbourhood, doing one of the few jobs still open to them, earning a few extra coppers by banging on doors and windows to wake people up in time for work; or the lamplighters who came round the streets lighting the gas lamps in the evenings and extinguishing them again at dawn; or even the local policemen, supplementing their wages on their early-morning beats. Now clocks were becoming cheaper, and within a few years the knocker-ups, like parlourmaids and rag and bone men, would fade into history.

Madge got out of bed, provoking a sleepy mumble of complaint from Rose as she clambered over her. By the time she went downstairs, her mum was already busy, riddling out the ashes and coaxing the fire back to life to boil the smoke-blackened kettle she had filled. Madge washed her face and hands at the sink, shivering at the chill of the water. She dressed in her new overall and spent ages tying and retying her turban in front of the mirror in the hall, but each time it looked a mess. ‘I just can’t seem to get it right,’ she said, as her sister came clattering down the stairs.

‘Here, I’ll do it for you,’ Rose said, ‘but you’ll soon get the hang of it.’ She retied it, gave a nod of satisfaction and then hurried through to the kitchen. Madge submitted patiently to her mum’s inspection, then walked up to the factory with Rose, both of them eating a slice of bread as their breakfast on the way. Madge’s gums were still sore and she tore the crusts off her bread and gave them to her sister.

Haxby Road was packed with people, all moving in the same direction. Most of the men were on bicycles, with the women on foot, a tide of white-overalled and turbaned workers flooding through the gates. They slowed to a jostling queue as they passed through the double doors into the main building. Rowntree’s rules on timekeeping were strict. Everyone had to record their exact starting and finishing times by putting their time card into one of the four clocking-in machines by the timekeeper’s office inside the main entrance, or in the time clocks in the individual departments. The process of clocking-in was known to the girls as ‘blicking-in’, because the Rowntree’s time clocks were made by a company called Blick Time Recorders Ltd, and the word ‘BLICK’ was prominently displayed in block capitals on the face of the clocks. To encourage good timekeeping, Rowntree’s gave a ‘Blue Riband’ award to those with 100 per cent attendance over the course of a year.

There was a ‘ping’ sound as each employee’s card was time-stamped by the machines, and the whole entrance lobby echoed with the tinny noise. Madge gave her name to the timekeeper, who riffled through a handful of new blicking-in cards and handed her one with her name and department typed neatly at the top. Rose could have showed Madge the way to the Card Box Mill, but the company rules about introducing new employees to their workplace were as precise and unbreakable as every other aspect of Rowntree’s operations, so Rose went on ahead while Madge was greeted by her designated guide and led through the factory towards the Card Box Mill.

It was a long walk, because the Card Box Mill was at the northeastern corner of the factory site. The corridor that led to Madge’s workplace was windowless, flanked by offices all the way down the right-hand side, and by a vast, concrete-floored storage area on the other side. At the far end they took a staircase up to the first floor, the main card box production area, where the beautiful fancy boxes for the chocolate assortments were made. As Madge reached the top of the stairs and looked around the vast room, she was met by a wall of sound. The noise of the clattering machines on every side was deafening, and the women working there were shouting above the din just to make themselves heard.

Built ten years before, the Card Box Mill housed about 500 workers, the vast majority of them women. They worked in a huge, wood-floored open space, interrupted only by the steel pillars supporting the roof, with electric lights hanging from the steel girders that spanned the full width of the enormous room. The overhead lighting was harsh and it was always bright in there, and often extremely hot. Along with the eye-watering smell of the glue they used to stick the boxes together, there was also a rather fusty odour, suggesting a lack of care in cleaning and dusting that would never have been tolerated in the food production areas. The same applied to the pigeons that often found their way into the Card Box Mill and became trapped there. As fast as one lot were caught or killed and removed, others found their way in through broken windows or gaps around the roof edges, or by flying in through the main doors that were always left open in hot weather to provide much-needed ventilation, for it was one of the least comfortable places in the entire factory to work.

The roof – a series of steep-pitched ridges and troughs – was entirely glazed, and as a result the mill was freezing in winter, while in summer the heat was almost unbearable. Every door and window was left open to try to create a draught, and the women workers wore nothing but underwear or even swimsuits beneath their overalls, but it had little effect and sweat dripped steadily from their foreheads as they worked. Even when the glass roof was eventually whitewashed to reflect the sun’s rays a little, the Card Box Mill remained ferociously hot.

Madge’s guide stood over her while she pushed her card into the time clock and then showed her where to place it in the wooden racks. She then handed Madge over to the teacher – there was one in every department – whose duties included showing new girls how to do the jobs to which they had been allocated, and inspecting the work that all the women were producing, checking it for quality, making sure that materials were not being wasted and that the girls were working fast and neatly enough; ‘And they soon let you know if you weren’t!’ one such worker, Muriel, recalls with a rueful smile. As well as the teacher, there were examiners, overlookers – Grade A and Grade B – and charge-hands, and all of them were women. The various grades were distinguished by the different coloured bands on the caps they wore: teachers had a red band, Grade A overlookers a blue one, and Grade B overlookers a green one.

In the employment of women, as in much else, Rowntree’s had always been more progressive than almost any other manufacturer. The Quaker belief that God was in everyone, men and women alike, gave women as much right as men to testify or take part in the ministry at gatherings of the Society of Friends, as the Quakers were properly known, and also to seek employment if they chose. As a result, women had always worked alongside men in the Rowntree’s factory – albeit on lower wages and with fewer privileges than their male counterparts. Rowntree’s was also one of the first factories in Britain where women were allowed to progress beyond menial tasks to supervisory and managerial roles; the first, a ‘Lady Welfare Supervisor’, had been appointed by Joseph Rowntree as far back as 1891. He also allowed production line workers a say in the appointment of their immediate supervisors – charge-hands and overlookers – an example of industrial democracy that few modern industrialists have been willing to contemplate even to this day.

The teacher took Madge to an empty space on a workbench, talked her through the work she was to do and showed her how to do it once, then left her to learn it properly by watching the woman next to her and following her instructions. The cardboard pieces were cut for them, and Madge and the other box-makers’ job was to fix them together, cover them with glue – there was a pot of glue and a brush on each bench – and stick the lining paper to them, pulling it taut and shaping it to fit the curves and angles of the box they were making. She had to fashion the lid in the same way, glue the printed illustration to it, and add any ribbons or decorations that were needed.

As she watched the quick, sure movements of the woman alongside her as she created a beautiful box, lining it, shaping the lid and fixing ribbons and tassels to it, Madge had a sinking feeling. If she did the job for a hundred years, she could not imagine how she was ever going to be able to make something as perfect as that. She was so disheartened that the thought of leaving and finding other work somewhere else crossed her mind for a moment, but the thought of the volcanic reaction that would provoke from her mother was enough to dispel that idea, and she buckled down to the task of learning the job.

For the first few days, as the newest junior in the department, she was kept busy on subsidiary tasks, keeping the box-makers supplied with card, paper and the other materials they needed, and topping up their glue pots with the foul-smelling liquid glue they used. The glue pots sat bubbling away on small Bunsen burners and the fumes would not only get on the girls’ chests, but also left a foul taste in their mouths. The smell and the fumes made Madge feel nauseous at first, so much so that she nearly had to run to the toilet to throw up at one point, but slowly she got used to them as she began to learn the craft of box-making.

Her first few efforts were something of an embarrassment, with the paper lining full of lumps, bumps and creases, the folds in the card not sharp enough or in the wrong place, and with dribbles of glue on the outside, but she rapidly improved and before long her work was drawing admiring glances from her fellow workers and even compliments from the overlookers. Although there were no formal apprenticeships for women in the factory, as there were for the men learning skilled trades like carpentry, bricklaying, painting, decorating and electrical engineering at Rowntree’s, work such as box-making was highly skilled and a genuine trade, and despite her earlier misgivings Madge ultimately proved to be one of the most skilful of all. The skills that she and the other Rowntree’s girls acquired at work increased their self-confidence, and that confidence often extended into their home lives as well. Many felt more able to stand up for themselves and argue their corner with a father or husband, though a woman who was thought by men to be too ‘pushy’ or ‘gobby’ was often deemed a ‘factory girl’ – shorthand for a loud, crude and foul-mouthed woman.

Rowntree’s paid workers a week in hand – the girls were paid on Thursday afternoons for the work they had done the previous week – so Madge had to wait eleven days before she received her first wages. Early on the Thursday afternoon, a woman from the pay office appeared in the Card Box Mill, pushing a trolley along the aisle between the clanking machines and pausing at each workbench to hand out a pay packet. A man walked alongside her, his eyes darting everywhere, as if he was riding shotgun on a wagon train and expecting an attack by outlaws at any moment.

The system of paying wages had been rather less formal in Rowntree’s early days. In the old factory at Tanners Moat, everyone kept their own note of the hours they had worked and at the end of each week the foreman went round with a hat full of coins, asked each of them, ‘How much time has thou got?’ and then paid them accordingly.

Madge had been trying to imagine what it would feel like to hold her first ever pay packet, and the feeling did not disappoint. She signed her name in the ledger to show that she’d received her wages, and then held the small brown paper packet unopened in her hands, savouring the moment. She turned it over and was about to rip it open when Rose called across to her, ‘Tear off the corner and check it first. Once you’ve opened it, you can’t go to the pay office and complain, even if your wages are short. They might just say you’ve pocketed it and are trying it on.’

Madge tore off a corner of the pay packet and fingered the edge of one crisp, new ten-shilling note. She shook the packet, heard the rattle of a coin and tipped the packet to let the coin slide to the top so that she could make sure it was a shilling. She turned the packet over again, ripped it open and took out her wages. The ten-bob note, the first she’d ever had in her hands, was pristine, straight from the bank and without a crease in it, and it almost felt like sacrilege to fold it up and put it in the little blue sailor bag hanging around her neck, where she kept her money for her tea because they were not allowed to have pockets in their overalls.

Madge had been taken on as a junior at the minimum Rowntree’s wage of eleven shillings a week, and she didn’t even see much of that because, like all her sisters and brothers, she had to march straight home on pay day and hand her wage packet to her mum. She would keep ten shillings (fifty pence) for Madge’s keep and then give her back the odd shilling as spending money. From then on, every week Madge spent sixpence (two and a half pence) on the price of admission to a dance at the New Earswick Folk Hall or the Assembly Rooms in the centre of York, and used the other sixpence to buy make-up: ‘I always loved my make-up,’ she says, ‘and I would far rather spend my money on that than the sweets, drinks or stockings that my sisters often bought with their money.’ However, Madge didn’t even have a shilling to spend during her first few weeks at Rowntree’s, because she had to pay for her own uniforms for work – the white overall and turban to cover her hair – and she had to have two of them, so that she had one to wear while the other was in the wash.

As in most other industries of that era, the rules about uniforms for work were more strict for women employees than for men, and the male authors of the Rowntree’s rule book also made patronizing attempts to link the requirements of food hygiene to attractiveness and style, including the comment that: ‘A Clean Cap and Overall Properly Worn Make an Attractive Uniform. A Workmanlike Appearance is the Best of Styles for the Workroom.’ Although admittedly far less men worked on the production lines, rules about covering hair with a cap were not applied to them until 1953, and it is probably no coincidence that from that date onwards, the company itself provided and paid for staff uniforms, whereas previously, women employees had been expected to provide their own, at their own expense.

The women didn’t wear hairnets – the rules requiring them to be worn at work were not introduced until the 1960s – but without exception, all the women production workers, even in areas like the Card Box Mill where no edible items were produced, had to wear turbans, and as Madge had discovered, there was an art to tying these. There was also often a conflict between the factory regulations and the dictates of fashion: the rules stated that all the woman’s hair had to be tucked under the turban, but most women left at least a fringe of hair exposed, and often much more than that.

During Madge’s early days in the Card Box Mill, an overlooker came marching along the production line one day, brandishing a couple of hairs that had found their way into a completed chocolate box. Madge’s sister Rose had beautiful, lustrous long hair, and when not at work had it arranged in ringlets down her back – ‘She used to win prizes for it at the Rialto,’ Madge says. Rose was now singled out and told to report to the manager’s office.

She returned to the house that lunchtime in floods of tears. Their mum looked up from her cooking and said, ‘Now then, our Rose, what’s wrong with you?’

‘I’ve been told off about my hair,’ Rose said. ‘They found a hair in one of the boxes and they think it’s one of mine.’

Madge’s mum gave her a look that was somewhat lacking in sympathy and then said, ‘Come here a moment, then.’ Rose gave her a puzzled look, but did as she was told, and Madge’s mum immediately took out her kitchen scissors and cropped off all of Rose’s long ringlets, saying, ‘There you are. Problem solved!’ However, when she’d finished snipping away with the scissors, and saw all those beautiful ringlets lying on the floor, Madge’s mum joined in with Rose’s tears and sobbed even louder than her daughter.

Juniors like Madge were paid lower rates when they were young, and they didn’t go on to the full adult wage until they were twenty-one. Like many other manufacturers, at times when there was no shortage of labour Rowntree’s used to save money by getting rid of workers when they were old enough to qualify for a full adult wage and taking on another fourteen-year-old instead. Men received higher pay than women, even when performing exactly the same task, but they were just as vulnerable to being sacked as soon as they qualified for the full adult wage. Madge’s three brothers were all fired by Rowntree’s when they reached their twenty-first birthdays. One of them, Ted, the second eldest, couldn’t find other work around York and in the end emigrated to Australia. That was in the days of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’, when it cost you ten pounds to emigrate there on voyages that were heavily subsidized by the Australian government. Neither Ted nor his parents had that kind of money, but their neighbours heard about it, held a collection in the street and raised seven pounds for him. Madge’s dad then told Ted, ‘I’ll give you the other three pounds.’ So Ted and another boy from the street went out to Australia together on a steamer packed with Ten Pound Poms. It was a ten- to twelve-week journey, and once out there the emigrants had to remain there for at least two years or repay the full cost of their passage – the huge sum of £120. As a result, most emigrants did not return to Britain for many years, even for a brief visit, and some never came back at all.

Madge was nine years old when Ted left. It was to be forty-seven years before she or any other member of the family saw him again, and it was several years before they had news of him at all. Madge’s mum wrote regular letters to the last address she had for him, but they all came back unopened, because neither his family nor the Australian authorities had any idea where he was. Like thousands of others in those bitter years of the 1930s, he was unemployed for a long time, wandering the outback trying to eke out a living and find some work somewhere, even if it was just an hour or two’s labour in return for food or a roof over his head for the night. Without work, Ted was reduced to eating out of bins, or anything he could find. He did not write to his family, partly because he didn’t even have money for a stamp, but also because he didn’t want to write with a tale of failure, preferring to leave them in ignorance of the dire straits he was in.

However, Ted came to an outback farm one day and asked the farmer’s wife for work or something to eat. She pointed to a pile of logs and told him that if he split those for her, she’d give him some food. He chopped the logs for her and did a few more odd jobs around the farm over the next few days, and eventually he was taken on as a permanent worker. The farmer’s wife had a daughter, Maud, and she and Ted started courting and in time they got married.

Madge was a married woman with children of her own long before Ted returned to Britain, but finally, forty-seven years after emigrating as a Ten Pound Pom, he came home on a visit, bringing Maud to meet his mum, who by then was in her late eighties. Madge’s mum had always said, ‘Whatever else, I’ll live to see our Ted come back,’ and she was as good as her word, and in fact lived for many years after that, dying at the ripe old age of ninety-five. However, her husband had died of a stroke some years before Ted came home, and was never to see his son again. A few years after that visit, Madge and her sister Ginny went out to Australia together and stayed with Ted and Maud on the farm, which by then they’d inherited.

When Madge started at Rowntree’s in 1932, Ginny was working as a tour guide, showing visitors around the factory. There were seventy women working in the Guides department, a reflection of the huge popularity of the Rowntree’s factory tours. School parties, clubs and all sorts of other organizations – 70,000 people a year in total – took the free tours, coming from all over the North of England and far beyond, by train, charabanc and later, as affluence increased, by car. People coming by train arrived at Rowntree’s Halt and the guides, dressed in cream overalls edged with brown piping and wearing navy-blue court shoes, would walk through the factory to meet them there. Other arrivals were dropped off by bus outside the guides’ office in part of the Dining Block.

Ginny was a lively character and very popular with the visitors. Their dad used to say, ‘There’s always one devilish one in a family,’ and in the Fishers it was Ginny, though Madge herself was not far behind. Ginny was, Madge says, ‘a real devil, always cracking jokes, playing tricks and bending the rules whenever she could’. Rowntree’s tour guides were strictly forbidden to accept tips, but many visitors, especially the Americans, were accustomed to tipping everywhere they went and Ginny was certainly not going to look such a gift horse in the mouth. As she was showing the visitors around the factory, she would glance behind her to make sure there were no supervisors or managers within earshot and then say, ‘We’re not supposed to accept tips, you know, but in case you’re interested, that’s my pocket right there!’

As a tour guide, Ginny often had to work very long hours. The tours didn’t start until 8.30 a.m. but the guides still had to turn up for work at 7.30, and spent the first hour of their day working on the production lines. They then assembled in a long line and were given one of the five routes: A, B, C, D or E. Each guide would take a small group, usually about eight people, and lead them on a three-mile walk around the factory that took two hours to complete. One tour started at the Card Box Mill, another in the Gum department, another at the Cream Block, another at the offices, and the last one at the Melangeur Block. The name Melangeur (the workers pronounced it ‘mullanja’) had been adopted from a term used by the French and Swiss confectioners who had perfected the art of chocolate-making. Mélangeur meant ‘mixer’ in French and the Melangeur Block was where all the chocolate for the factory was made.

As well as the general public, Rowntree’s also used factory tours to strengthen the company’s links with wholesalers and retailers. Once a year a train would set off from London and ‘stop at just about every station’ to pick up local shopkeepers and bring them to York for a factory tour. The guides would go down to Rowntree’s Halt to meet them and show them around the factory, and then serve them tea. There were evening tours too, and dinners, and Ginny would sometimes work till midnight, having been there since 7.30 a.m., though if they worked that late, Rowntree’s did at least pay for taxis to make sure that all the guides got home safely.

While Ginny led factory tours, Madge and her sister Rose were hand-making fancy boxes, but their other sister in the Card Box Mill, Laura, was at the machine end of the room, doing much less interesting work, making plain boxes and the ‘outers’ – the large cartons in which the completed boxes were shipped. She would have loved to have been working in the same section as Madge and her other sisters, making boxes of all shapes and sizes, as it was interesting work and very skilled. There were heart-shaped boxes for Valentine’s Day, and special ones for Christmas and Easter, as well as for one-off presentations. When Madge was eighteen she was chosen to make four beautiful boxes to be presented to Queen Mary and her three ladies in waiting during a visit to the factory, all in ruched satin with drawers with silk tassels, and each box a different colour: gold for the Queen, and red, green and blue for her ladies in waiting. The Queen spent some time standing at the end of the bench, right next to Madge, watching her work, and it was all Madge could do to stop her hands trembling with nerves.

Even though Madge and the other girls had stools at their workbenches, they usually used them to hold their work because, with boxes stacked while they waited for the glue to dry, there wasn’t enough space on their benches for everything. They preferred to stand anyway – it wasn’t possible to do the work while sitting down – but they were more than ready for a rest and a sit down by the end of the day. They had a ten-minute break in the morning – there was no afternoon break – but they did not have time to go to the dining hall during break time, so they would all buy a mug of tea or cocoa, or a glass of milk or squash from the trolley brought round to each department by one of the servers from the Dining Block. Rather than sit on their high stools in full view of the overlookers, Madge and the other girls used to lay their stools on their sides, flat on the floor next to the machines, and then perch on the legs and chat until they finished their drinks. Sometimes they would even crawl underneath the benches where they worked, out of sight of the overlookers, but they had to crawl back out as soon as the bell went to signal the end of the break, and get cracking again straight away.

As they were doing hand-work, Madge and her workmates could go for a short toilet break whenever they needed one, whereas Madge’s sister Laura at the other end of the room had to wait for break time. Like those at many other factories, she and her workmates could only leave their work stations during official rest periods, because if anyone left at other times they had to stop the machines. ‘You all had to go to the toilet together,’ one of them recalls. ‘We worked from half past seven to half past five, and you kept working until the conveyor stopped.’

Another woman, Kath, who worked in Cream Packing, putting the chocolate assortments into the boxes that Madge and her workmates made, recalls that:

We used to get a ten-minute toilet break when they’d stop the machines and we all had to go to the toilet together, because when the conveyor was running you had to be working. One charge-hand was a real stickler. She would look at the clock and say, ‘Right, ten minutes, no longer,’ and then turn the machine off. Precisely ten minutes later, whether or not everyone was back from the toilet, she’d turn the machine back on again. Down would come all the chocolates, and the last few girls would be scrambling to get back to their places in time. With the time it took to get there and back, you’d only have six minutes’ break time, but it was amazing what you could get up to in those six minutes, especially my friend Joyce. She used to draw black lines on bits of white paper, stick them on her eyelids, like giant false eyelashes, and walk down the aisle between the machines, fluttering her eyelids at the men she passed going down the room.

The girls were not allowed food on their workbenches, so if they wanted something to eat at break time, they either had to eat it sitting on the floor or go downstairs to the room where they kept their coats. Again, as soon as they had finished eating, they had to rush to the toilets and then be back at the machines ready to start work as soon as they started running. ‘If you weren’t there,’ says one of them, ‘that was your lookout and you’d be struggling to catch up.’

Some of Madge’s workmates in the hand-work section took advantage of their relative freedom compared to the machine box-makers stuck at their workplaces on the conveyor belt, and they often used a toilet break as an excuse to go for a crafty smoke outside, since smoking was forbidden anywhere within the factory buildings. Madge did not smoke, but her friend Alice would often pretend to have period pains in order to take a break; if the overlookers had been more alert, they might have noticed that she appeared to be having two or three periods a month.

There was a rest room as well, where women could go if they weren’t feeling well. They could have an hour’s sleep and then, if they still didn’t feel any better, they could go home. This was also open to a certain amount of abuse, and sometimes Madge or one of the other girls would either elude the overlookers and sneak off to the rest room or pretend an illness they didn’t really feel, and then go and have a quick forty winks.

Until the age of eighteen, like all the other juniors at Rowntree’s, Madge spent a few hours a week at what were known as ‘Day Continuation’ classes, another of Joseph Rowntree’s liberal innovations, aimed at extending the education of his workforce for a few years beyond their schooldays. Employees had to attend classes one day a week for boys and one afternoon a week for girls. For the most part, the classes were not aimed at improving their working skills, but rather as an end in themselves, giving them a taste of music and drama, for example, that they might otherwise never have experienced.

Miss Birkenshaw took the drama group, and while most of the girls and women at Rowntree’s wore plain-coloured, utilitarian clothes in more or less drab shades of green, brown, grey or black, she was an altogether more exotic specimen. Her hair was immaculately coiffed and she wore thick make-up with heavily rouged cheeks that made her look a little like a Japanese geisha, and she always dressed in heavily frilled blouses and suits in vivid shades of pink, red and orange. Her reading style was equally dramatic and her choice of mainstream, middle-brow books such as Jamaica Inn proved very popular with Madge and the other girls.

Miss Johnson, the music teacher, was a much less flamboyant character but no less well liked by her pupils. She was a Scot, with a soft Highlands accent, and taught the girls everything from traditional Scottish ballads to light opera and classical music. She wore her long, dark hair in a bun, but as she waved her hands about conducting an imaginary orchestra while the music played, her hairpins would often fall out and her hair would tumble around her shoulders while the class collapsed in fits of giggles.

The girls were also expected to improve their physical condition through PT (physical training) sessions, and Miss Birkenshaw often took those classes as well. In winter or in poor weather, the sessions were held in the factory gymnasiums – one for each sex – in the long glass veranda along one side of the Dining Block, but in summer the classes were held out of doors, often on the Rose Lawn near the main gates of the factory. Madge and the other girls, shivering and self-conscious, had to go outside and over the road, wearing their shorts that looked like navy-blue knickers, and they had to do their exercises on the lawn with everyone peering out of the windows at them, as one of them later recalled: ‘I always hated PT because of that.’ Those who were keener on exercise could also do fitness and athletics classes after working hours, some of them run by Audrey Kilner-Brown, who worked in the Personnel department but was well qualified to coach athletics, having won a silver medal in the 100 metres at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The Day Continuation classes took place in the Dining Block, where the junior employees were also taught skills for life. In the case of girls, such skills were often, though not always, linked to their supposed future roles as wives and mothers. In autumn 1938, the company’s house journal Cocoa Works Magazine noted ‘a strong demand for courses of instruction in the domestic field, helpful to brides to be’, and ten years later the magazine was still proudly claiming that they helped ‘the natural ambition of the normal girl for marriage and motherhood’.

However, the girls’ classes were not confined to the domestic duties that wives and mothers were expected to carry out; they were also taught a variety of subjects that appeared to vary from year to year according to the skills, interests and sometimes the hobbies of those appointed to teach them. Many girls seem to have been taught English and natural sciences but, perhaps surprisingly in the context of the times, many also learned woodwork, making wooden trays, stools or other small items for their homes.

Madge and her classmates were also taken to see the glazed hot house near the Dining Block, where the gardeners grew tropical fruits like bananas, as well as vanilla pods and cocoa beans, though the latter were for demonstration purposes, not for production. During the war years, when imports of fruit from the Caribbean virtually ceased, that hot house was one of the few places in Britain where you could actually find a banana. There were also grass tennis courts between the hot house and the Haxby Road, one of several leisure facilities that women employees on short-time working were encouraged to use, and behind the tennis courts there were flowerbeds where the gardeners grew the cut flowers for the vases spread throughout the factory.